The Economic Crisis Bites

This morning I got a message through Nature Network from a Ms. Mary W.Matsuno of Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire, West Africa. I suspect some of you got the same message. Here is how it starts:

bq. Dear ,

I deem it a respect and honour as well as priviledge to write you on my deep conviction about you, after my deligent search for a honest and trustworthy someone who will assist me of which I have chosen you to assist me for the transfer of an inheritance which I inherited from my late father that was poisoned to death by his relatives associates out of enviness.

My name is Mary W.Matsuno, I am 19yrs old, a native of Sierra-leone in West African region in the local districk of Konobo and am the only child of late William Matsuno, my late father is a Diamond Officer in the Republic of Sierra-leone.But before his death in a private hospital here in Abidjan where he was brought for us to fly oversaes for his medical care before he suddenly died, he told me of a fixed deposit of US$9,800,000 he had with a bank in Abidjan here which he made me the next of kin because my mother died when I was two yrs old.

Putting aside the issues of spam from NN (which I’m sure they’re sorting out), this shows us how badly the economic crisis is biting. Back in the good old days, spammers would be waving fifty, sixty million dollars (US) in front of our noses, with promises of getting most of it. But now it’s less than $10m (TEN MILLION DOLLARS), with no guarantee of a percentage of it. You know the economy’s bad when even the scammers are cutting back on what they’re offering.

I got the same message this morning, even though a) I am not rich, and b) there are no cats in this house, only a Labrador retriever and a betta. I clocked on the “report message” link, though I’m not sure whether it went through. It originated from a sender other than Ms. Mary Matsuno.

I regret to say that this email got as far as Cromer, even though we are very far from the urban metrop where fibre optics are de rigeur, or even in the copper-clad suburbs, but where the signal must perforce pass through several pieces of damp bailer twine loosely knotted together. (We get the same signal, but it comes out more slowlt and two octaves higher.)
Ddon’t worry, I dispatched a small boy with a message in a cleft stick with strict instructions to go to London and deliver the message safely into the hands of Mr Matthew Brown of Clerkenwell.

Come to that, why pick scientists? We’re poor
Precisely! That’s yet another sign of the times: there’s so little cash out there that scammers have resorted to trying to milk something out of us scientist! It kind of makes one feel sorry for them: all those rich relatives kicking the bucket under improbable circumstances and in remote locations of the globe, and all for nothing!